Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Every once in a while, I try to explain racism to someone who genuinely seems unable to understand what the problem is with it.

And honestly, I don’t know how to do it without making my own fucking head hurt.

So let’s try something completely ridiculous.

Not because the subject is funny, but because sometimes the only way to explain an irrational idea is to construct an equally irrational one and follow it all the way to its logical conclusion.

Imagine that tomorrow morning, humanity collectively decides that eye color determines human worth.

Not personality.

Not character.

Not intelligence.

Not what you’ve accomplished.

Your fucking eyes.

And because green eyes are among the rarest eye colors in the world, we decide that green-eyed people are obviously the superior form of humanity.

Why?

Because they’re rare.

And apparently, in this hypothetical universe, rarity equals superiority.

Congratulations.

We have invented Eye Color Nationalism.

Green eyes are now the gold standard.

If you’re green-eyed, you’re automatically considered intelligent, trustworthy, sophisticated, beautiful, hardworking and morally superior.

Nobody has actually tested any of this.

There are no studies proving it.

There is no scientific basis for it.

But look at those eyes!

They’re green!

Clearly, God, evolution, or some mysterious cosmic accounting department has selected these people for greatness.

Brown eyes?

Too common.

Blue eyes?

Nice try.

Hazel?

Confusing.

Gray?

Suspicious.

Green?

Ah. The master race.

And now we build an entire society around this completely arbitrary characteristic.

Green-eyed people get the best schools.

They get preferential treatment when applying for jobs.

They get the nicest neighborhoods.

They get more political representation.

When a green-eyed person commits a crime, everyone says, “Well, that was an individual.”

When a brown-eyed person commits the same crime, suddenly we’re having a national conversation about the behavioral tendencies of brown-eyed people.

See how quickly this becomes insane?

Now imagine that we start teaching children this nonsense.

Generation after generation grows up hearing that green-eyed people are superior.

Eventually, green-eyed people begin to believe it.

Some become genuinely convinced that their green eyes are evidence of superior intelligence.

Others become convinced that brown-eyed people are naturally lazy.

Blue-eyed people are supposedly emotional.

Hazel-eyed people can’t be trusted.

And gray-eyed people are apparently communists.

Nobody remembers where these beliefs came from anymore.

They’re just traditions.

They’re part of the culture.

They’re what we’ve always believed.

Then somebody finally asks:

“Wait a minute. Why are green-eyed people superior?”

And the answer is:

“Because they’re green-eyed.”

“Okay, but what does that have to do with their intelligence?”

“They’re green-eyed.”

“What does it have to do with their character?”

“They’re green-eyed.”

“What does it have to do with whether they’re a good person?”

“They’re green-eyed.”

“Can you prove any of this?”

“Well, look how many successful green-eyed people there are.”

And now we’ve arrived at the really interesting part.

Because if green-eyed people have spent generations receiving better schools, better jobs, better housing, better healthcare, better opportunities and greater social acceptance, eventually you’re going to be able to point to those outcomes and say:

“See! Green-eyed people really are more successful.”

No shit.

You’ve been stacking the fucking deck for them.

That’s not evidence of inherent superiority.

That’s evidence that opportunity produces results.

And here’s where the thought experiment gets even more absurd.

Imagine two newborn babies.

They are born on the exact same day.

They have healthy brains.

They have the same potential.

Neither has committed a crime.

Neither has done anything good or bad.

Neither has demonstrated intelligence, laziness, courage, cowardice, honesty, dishonesty, kindness, cruelty, ambition or apathy.

They are fucking babies.

Now imagine that one baby has green eyes and the other has brown eyes.

And somebody looks at those two infants and says:

“I already know something important about these human beings because of the color of their eyes.”

No.

You don’t.

You know what color their eyes are.

That’s it.

You haven’t discovered their personality.

You haven’t unlocked their IQ.

You haven’t examined their moral character.

You haven’t received a divine notification informing you of their future behavior.

You know what color their fucking eyes are.

Yet somehow humanity has repeatedly taken completely arbitrary physical characteristics and tried to turn them into hierarchies of human beings.

And here’s the part that should make anybody’s brain hurt:

What if we reversed the colors?

What if tomorrow we decided brown eyes were the rare and desirable ones?

Suddenly brown-eyed people are exceptional.

Blue-eyed people are suspicious.

Green-eyed people are overrated.

And every argument we previously made about the inherent superiority of green eyes suddenly becomes applicable to brown eyes.

The biological reality didn’t change.

The people didn’t change.

The eye colors didn’t change.

Only the story we told ourselves about them changed.

And that’s the point.

**The hierarchy was never actually contained in the eye color.

We put the hierarchy there.**

That’s what makes racism so profoundly fucking stupid.

Human beings take a visible characteristic—skin color, ancestry, facial features, whatever—and attach a completely unrelated set of assumptions to it.

Then we spend centuries defending those assumptions as though they’re laws of physics.

But skin color doesn’t contain a personality.

It doesn’t contain a work ethic.

It doesn’t contain an IQ score.

It doesn’t contain morality.

It doesn’t contain criminal intent.

It doesn’t contain kindness.

It doesn’t contain courage.

It doesn’t contain ambition.

It doesn’t contain the contents of someone’s fucking soul.

It’s a biological characteristic.

That’s it.

Just like eye color.

And here’s another thing that people sometimes miss.

Even if you could demonstrate a statistical difference between two enormous populations—and that conversation would require considerably more nuance than a fucking meme—you still haven’t told me anything meaningful about the individual standing in front of you.

If I tell you that men are, on average, taller than women, that doesn’t mean every man is taller than every woman.

If I tell you one population has a particular statistical characteristic, that doesn’t give you permission to assign that characteristic to every individual member of that population.

That’s called stereotyping.

And we already understand this concept.

We understand it perfectly when it applies to almost everything else.

We don’t look at a random person and say:

“You’re from Arizona, therefore I know your personality.”

We don’t look at someone wearing a baseball cap and say:

“Ah. I have determined your entire moral character.”

We don’t meet a 6-foot-4 man and immediately conclude:

“Obviously, this man is good at basketball.”

Because that would be fucking stupid.

Yet somehow, when it comes to race, human beings have repeatedly decided that this is an acceptable shortcut for understanding other human beings.

And then we get offended when somebody points out that the shortcut is bullshit.

Racism is essentially the intellectual laziness of replacing a human being with a category.

Instead of learning who someone actually is, you decide you already know.

Instead of judging an individual by their behavior, you judge them by their ancestry.

Instead of asking, “What kind of person is this?” you ask, “What category does this person belong to?”

Congratulations.

You’ve replaced a human being with a filing system.

And what makes this even more absurd is that none of us chose the characteristics we’re supposedly being judged by.

Nobody walked into the delivery room and said:

“Excuse me, doctor. I’d like to order the melanin package, please.”

Nobody selected their parents.

Nobody selected their ancestry.

Nobody selected the geographic location of their ancestors thousands of years ago.

Nobody picked their genetic lottery numbers.

And yet we’re perfectly willing to construct elaborate hierarchies around things people never had the opportunity to choose.

That isn’t meritocracy.

That’s assigning people grades for an exam they weren’t allowed to study for and didn’t even know they were taking.

And if your response is, “Well, my group is better,” I have a very simple question:

Better at what?

And according to whom?

And based on what?

Because the moment you start answering those questions, you eventually discover that you’re not really talking about race anymore.

You’re talking about culture.

Economics.

History.

Geography.

Education.

Opportunity.

Family.

Environment.

Politics.

Individual behavior.

And suddenly we’ve arrived at the uncomfortable truth:

People are complicated.

Which is precisely why racism is so attractive to people who don’t want to deal with that complexity.

Racism gives you a shortcut.

It allows you to take billions of individual human beings and shove them into a handful of boxes.

Good box.

Bad box.

Smart box.

Dangerous box.

Deserving box.

Undeserving box.

It’s wonderfully convenient.

It’s also fucking stupid.

Because human beings are not categories.

They’re human beings.

There are brilliant people and idiots in every population.

There are saints and assholes in every population.

There are criminals and doctors, heroes and cowards, geniuses and morons, generous people and selfish people in every imaginable demographic.

The distribution of human character does not conveniently stop at the boundaries of someone’s skin color.

And perhaps that’s the part that makes my head hurt the most.

If racism were actually some brilliant system for identifying human worth, you might at least understand why someone would be tempted by it.

But it isn’t.

It is an extraordinarily primitive attempt to make an impossibly complicated world easier to understand.

And the price of that simplicity is treating actual human beings as abstractions.

So if you genuinely don’t understand why racism is a bad idea, try this:

Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that your eye color determines your place in society.

Imagine being told you’re inferior because your eyes aren’t green.

Imagine watching someone with green eyes receive opportunities you never received.

Imagine being told that the statistical differences created by that system prove green-eyed people are naturally superior.

Imagine being judged before you speak.

Imagine being distrusted before you do anything.

Imagine someone deciding you’re inferior before they’ve learned your name.

Imagine your accomplishments being discounted because of what you look like.

Imagine your failures being treated as evidence against millions of people who share your ancestry.

Imagine being told that the circumstances of your birth somehow constitute evidence about the quality of your character.

Then imagine somebody finally looking at the whole thing and saying:

“Wait.

This is fucking ridiculous.

They’re just eyes.”

Exactly.

They’re just eyes.

And skin is just skin.

We’re the ones who decided otherwise.

And if you can understand the absurdity of inventing a hierarchy based on eye color, then congratulations.

You already understand racism.

Because the fundamental problem isn’t that somebody picked the wrong color.

The fundamental problem is believing that a person’s physical characteristics give you permission to decide what kind of human being they are.

Rarity isn’t morality.

Scarcity isn’t virtue.

Genetics isn’t a résumé.

And the circumstances of your birth are not evidence of your worth.

We’re all just human beings who happened to be born with different combinations of genetic lottery numbers.

The truly insane part isn’t that we are different.

The truly insane part is that we looked at those differences and decided some people deserved to be treated as less human because of them.

That’s the part that should make all of our heads fucking hurt.